America has long been a country divided, afflicted by the separation between white and black men and it still continues to this day. I Am Not Your Negro is a unique documentary that is an analysis of the civil rights movements of the 50’s and 60’s right through to the current Black Lives Matter movement….
Netflix’s new film Okja hits the streaming service this Thursday, a film whose director Bong Joon-Ho has citied George Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City amongst its influences. With the acclaimed Korean director in Sydney for the Sydney Film Festival, where Okja sat as the closing film, I caught up with the man himself (and…
Like it’s Tsotsitaal namesake meaning “to go”, Vaya, Directed by Akin Omotoso, literally begins on the move. Opening on a train bound to Johannesburg Vaya follows the intertwining paths of three young South Africans journeying from their rural homes in Kwazulu-Natal to eGoli, the city of Gold. All three are tasked with their own promises…
Placing itself somewhere between the genres of mumblecore and slice of life, A Quiet Dream directed by Zhang Lu, is an almost observational look into the invisible world of lower class Seoul. Set in the grimy fringe suburbs of Seoul, A Quiet Dream is a glimpse into the everyday of misfits bound to a life determined…
Apart from Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, I haven’t seen much of director Sofia Coppola‘s work. Known for her filmmaking approach to humanize her subjects with unorthodox methods like gentle pathos, looking through different character points-of-views outside the norm and the use of anachronisms, Coppola has achieved a reputation of being a director that is…
The Young Karl Marx (Le jeune Karl Marx) is a bio-pic that feels authentic because it captures the period well in a visual sense. But you also get the feeling that it is only telling a part of the story and not least because it is all about Karl Marx’s youth. This dramatic film is…
Whilst animation in film has evolved immensely over the last 20 years, there’s something immediately charming about Phantom Boy‘s deliberately flat and simple palleted aesthetic. It may lack the emotional weight of the technically more refined Pixar offerings, but this film’s distinct look feels organically melded to its somber mentality. Coming courtesy of French directing…
Based on a memoir by American writer James Lord and adapted for the screen by actor Stanley Tucci, Final Portrait is a concise passion project with committed performances and evident production care that sadly doesn’t overcome its bland setting. Anchored by a wonderful turn from Geoffrey Rush as eccentric painter Giacometti, this dramedy of sorts…
Acclaimed Indigenous Australian director, writer and performer Leah Purcell has been awarded the 2017 Sydney-UNESCO City of Film Award at last night’s closing of the Sydney Film Festival. The award follows a huge year for Leah, from adapting and starring in the theatre adaptation of acclaimed Australian novel The Drover’s Wife, with which she won the…
The Sydney Film Festival has come to a close for another year – and with it come all the great memories of the films that surprised us, inspired us and left us wishing the event would never end. Alas, it has – but here are five films we’re taking away with us as the best…
Last night’s Closing Gala for the 2017 Sydney Film Festival saw an array of diverse Australia films and talent receive distinctions, as well as the Australian premiere of highly-anticipated Netflix Original Film Okja as the 64th Festival came to a close. The prestigious Sydney Film Prize was awarded to Ildikó Enyedi‘s intriguing love story On Body and Soul, while…
A song is as song except when it’s a Terrence Malick film. The famous director’s latest experimental offering is an absolute waste in that it is all show and no substance. It weaves together cameos from famous A-list creatives and a cast of Hollywood’s finest actors and then it does nothing. Absolutely nothing. For 129…
Okja is a film involving a giant mutated pig. What more do you want? But seriously, in order to understand the hype of the film, you have to know the filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho. Bong Joon-Ho is an acclaimed Korean filmmaker who has made some incredible films. And the reason he is so acclaimed is his…
The story of The Go-Betweens had previously been largely untold save for Robert Forster’s autobiography, Grant & I. But the film, The Go-Betweens: Right Here is set to change that. It’s a wonderful music documentary that plays out like a love letter to a seminal, Australian band. It also dives head-first into the melodrama, adventure,…
Fans of off-kilter comedy should find something of value in Jeff Baena’s quirky spoof The Little Hours, a play on the 14th-century Giovanni Boccaccio novella The Decameron. With hefty doses of witchcraft, torture, and pan-sexuality peppered throughout the script, it’s not hard to see some viewers being confounded by Baena’s film just as much as those…
Thoroughly engaging, immensely poignant, and remarkably evocative, Call Me By Your Name functions as both a coming-of-age tale and a love story, likely to surprise viewers as to where it travels on both accounts. Based on the novel by Andre Aciman, and co-penned for the screen by director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash), James Ivory…
It would have been too easy for a film like Una to result in something unreservedly perfunctory. The fable of the abuse victim confronting her perpetrator has been depicted more than one would wish to count, and the argument can be made that a fair share wishes to portray the subject matter no more than…
Having proven his worth as a screenwriter with both Hell or High Water and Sicario, Wind River serves as scribe Taylor Sheridan’s directorial debut. Arguably arriving with high expectations, Sheridan’s tight, often brutal thriller proves his workings with such professionals as David Mackenzie and Denis Villeneuve has paid off, showcasing an ease behind the lens…
Making his directorial debut, penning the script and holding the starring role, Austrian actor Josef Hader has impressed festivals around the world with the dark comedy Wild Mouse – which has had its Australian premiere this week as part of the Sydney Film Festival. The film stars Hader as Georg, a classical music critic who…
Audacious is definitely the right word to start with when it comes to describing the Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie-directed Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves. At 180 minutes, it’s a leviathan of a film that often comes across as equal parts provocative and indecipherable. The central narrative here centers on…
I don’t want to make a Star Trek joke – it’d be too obvious and you would only resent me for it – but as much as it pains me, I do need to say that space really is the final frontier. It’s always right there, just outside our atmosphere, and for decades we humans…
Agnieszka Holland creates a character to love and to loath in Spoor, the Polish thriller-comedy that follows one woman’s passion for animal justice in a town that doesn’t share the same sentiments. Spoor, meaning the tracks left by an animal, is a film that rarely falls from the trail, coming together as a poignant comedy…
Some people subscribe to the theory that you’ve got to suffer for your art. Two such individuals include the Godfather of Punk, Iggy Pop and the best-selling French novelist, Michel Houellebecq. In To Stay Alive – A Method the pair share a meeting of minds in a film that is artistic, experimental and semi-autobiographical and…
You may want to walk away from Better Watch Out during its first half. For the first 30 minutes Chris Peckover gives us a Christmas-themed home invasion thriller that is sorely lacking in originality and only manages a few mild chuckles, upheld by teenage actors who are clearly struggling with the seemingly insipid material script….
It seems that American Indians have been erased from the history books, including the chapters relating to contemporary music. Until now. The documentary, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World looks set to change all of that by celebrating the contributions of these individuals and finally giving credit where it’s due. The film is directed…
Michael Haneke is a bit of a misanthrope, isn’t he? Granted, I haven’t seen all of his films, but the few that I have seen seem to have a very critical view on society and human nature. And compared to mainstream fare, he makes films with plenty of space for the audience to contemplate and…
The ghosts of never-ending war and destruction haunt Rusudan Glurjidze’s
Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind is a feature-length manhunt, set into motion by Shiori (Yuki Mamiya) riding her bike into the sea. She emerges as she entered, focused and unwavering, locking on to Kosuke (Tasuku Nagaoka), a playwright in pursuit of celibacy. Shiota’s film develops into a playful take on a Japanese sub-genre…
At first glance, I’m tempted to drum up some connection or parallel between You Have No Idea How Much I Love You and last year’s Europe, She Loves. Both are European documentaries that engross themselves utterly in their subjects and return with captivating insights into modern humanity. However, aside from the size of its ambitions,…
Out of all the cinematic genres, horror is, in my opinion, the best outlet for creative storytelling. Whether in a metaphorical sense, a symbolic sense, or just nuts-and-bolts mainstream filmmaking, horror can engage, thrill, scare and surprise, regardless of what it looks like on the outside. Case in point, David Cronenberg‘s The Fly. With a…
